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Bowe Bergdahl Reveals Why He Left Afghan Base in “Serial” Podcast

December 10, 2015

(WASHINGTON) — Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl is speaking out for the first time about his decision to walk away from his remote Army outpost in Afghanistan that led to his capture by the Taliban.

Sgt. Bergdahl’s phone conversations with filmmaker Mark Boals are featured in the new season of the wildly popular podcast Serial.

In those conversations, which were released Thursday, Bergdahl explains why he was motivated to leave his base and jeopardize the safety of his platoon.

“All I was seeing was basically leadership failure to the point that the lives of the guys standing next me to were literally, from what I could see, in danger of something seriously going wrong, and somebody being killed,” he says.

Bergdahl said he was unhappy with the leadership in his unit and believed no one would take his complaints seriously. So he devised a plan to hike 18 miles to another Army base and report his concerns to a general.

“I was fully confident that when someone took a look at the situation…that people would understand that I was right. What was going on was a danger to the lives of the men of that company,” Bergdahl says on the podcast.

Bergdahl also admits that he had the desire to prove himself as a kind of “super soldier,” like the fictional CIA spy Jason Bourne.

But only 20 minutes after leaving the post, in a remote area of Afghanistan, Bergdahl says he realized he was in over his head. “This really starts to sink in, that I really did something bad,” he says.

Bergdahl was soon captured by the Taliban and held captive for nearly five years. He was released in a controversial prisoner swap, in exchange for five Taliban detainees who were released from Guantanamo Bay.

Thursday, Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee released a report on the prisoner swap, saying the Department of Defense misled Congress about the trade and did not give Congress enough notice before releasing the Guantanamo Bay detainees to Qatar.

According to the report, the Obama administration conducted the swap “without properly informing Congress or even communicating the fact that the plan was being developed, despite a legal requirement and specific pledges to do precisely the opposite.”

In a rebuttal, Democrats said the report was “unbalanced” and “partisan,” but agreed with the conclusion that the Department of Defense didn’t “adequately inform” Congress about the prisoner transfer — and noted that the “question of legality” on the 30-day notice “remains unsettled.”